It started with a car. An old green Bentley, to be precise, parked outside a house in a village about a mile away from where we lived near Stamford, in Lincolnshire, and slowly melting into the drive. The tyres were flat and the paintwork was dull, with the patina of the abandoned. With a mix of sympathy for a lovely old motor rolling gently into ruin and a slightly predatory hope that the owner might let me have it for a ridiculously small amount of money, I popped over to find out what was going on. Which was when I saw The House.

The reason for the Bentley’s depressed state was soon obvious. Even though the house it was parked outside was a handsome, newly built stone affair, nobody was living there. Peeping over fences and walls told us more: the house seemed to have been unoccupied for a while. The garden was waist-high with weeds and there were no curtains to obstruct the view of the large rooms, including a huge kitchen-diner room that appeared to occupy the same square footage as the entire ground floor of our, er, bijou terrace.

We heard that the house had been on the market for just under £700,000: not excessive, but way above our “I’m not kidding, that really is it” budget of £450,000. After trying to sell our tiny three-bedroom home for two years, and facing a falling market and burgeoning family, my wife and I put it out of our minds. We simply couldn’t afford it.

Then, just before Christmas, it turned out that whoever owned the house couldn’t afford it either. The property was for sale as a repossession, for £500,000 – agonisingly close to what we could afford if we pulled out all the stops and resigned ourselves to eating nothing but value baked beans and making our own shoes.

My wife and I had The Chat. We would go to see it, as long as we promised not to fall in love with it or get carried away. Which was all forgotten as soon as we walked through the door. Or tried to: the front door had at some point been forced and was therefore partly welded into the frame. It was a similar story throughout the house. The dimensions and drive-by impression were impressive, but someone had torn through the structure removing anything of value, leaving only the kitchen untouched.

The previous owner had clearly run into some kind of trouble. The local rumour mill was spinning quickly: a business in trouble, or maybe an acrimonious divorce? Nobody seemed to know, although neighbours told stories of an evening visit from eight burly gentlemen who removed pretty much anything that wasn’t nailed down. Annoyingly, it transpired that the hot tub in the back garden had gone – as had the outdoor sauna. Wardrobes, fridges, television brackets, even some of the electrical extractor fans (worth all of £15, I reckon) had been reappropriated by people with all the physical subtlety of a JCB.

Wires hung from ceilings, whatever electrical equipment they once served having been pulled unceremoniously from the roof. The house had holes from untended internal leaks and damp from unconnected guttering that had merrily soused the external walls for the best part of a year. It was a good-looking wreck.

Still, when you’re looking through the house-buying equivalent of beer goggles, none of that seems to matter. It had space. It had good schools minutes’ walk away. It was empty. And with my wife seven months pregnant with our third child in four years, we needed to get settled. So, after batting back and forth, we made a successful offer of £460,000 – pretty good, even if the house needed a fair bit of work.

It has not been easy: we’ve had to borrow from parents to get the deposit together, sell the family car and find the local Aldi. We have blankets in the windows instead of curtains, and little furniture. The list of jobs to do is growing daily. But we moved in last week and it already feels like home.

Buying a repossession comes with a bit of irksome moral baggage. There’s a sadness to a house that’s been repossessed, mainly because you can’t help but imagine you’re somehow capitalising on someone else’s misfortune – that you have displaced a family just like your own, turning into a vulture feasting on the carcass of the financially fallen.

We shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much, though. After all, we didn’t cause the situation the unfortunate owners found themselves in. Nor did we buy the house to turn a quick buck – for us, it is somewhere to raise our family. There’s still a lingering worry that the house’s troubled financial history could adversely affect future credit ratings in some way, but any feeling of guilt we might have had has been assuaged by the thought that if we hadn’t done it, someone else certainly would have. That and the glorious reality of a 38ft kitchen. Sorry to be crass, but there it is.

Tom Ford is the co-host of Five’s motoring show Fifth Gear

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